Google+ updates its user interface, refines navigation and photos

New features include new navigation, photo and social tools.

Google announced today a major redesign and a set of new features for users of its Google+ service. Navigation and several user interface features on Google+ pages have gotten a design makeover, and several new features aim to attract more users to share photos and promote more interactions with each other.

Google has overhauled navigation by making things simpler than its previous design. Pages now feature a cleaner, more minimalist look to match some of Google's more recent updates to other applications like Gmail. A new "ribbon" of icons for home, profile, pages, and photos simplifies access to some of its major features. These icons can now be customized to users' individual preferences. The end result is that now pages have a very clean, streamlined look made up of app-like icons.

Google+'s new look and features also emphasize photos now more than ever before. Photos are now displayed prominently, using more space on the browser's screen. The new layouts are larger and more elegant, and they resemble the photo displays on sites like Tumblr or Flickr.

Google has made discussions and comments more visible, in an effort to make participation easier and more self-evident. The new "Explore" button highlights activity and posts by Google+ members as a stream of trending activity. This feature is likely an attempt to encourage more users to explore pages and people beyond the privacy of their own circles.

Hangouts have also received their own dedicated page and a design refresh. You can now view your own hangouts and track personal invites to hangouts more easily. Most notably, you can scan for other public hangouts that are available to join or watch in real time.

The new design began rolling out to some users starting today, and some features will be rolling out over the course of this week. In January of this year, Google announced it had 90 million users. Today's announcement says that more than 170 million have signed up for Google+ service, even if not all of them joined voluntarily. Google+ has positioned itself as an alternative to Facebook, and some of the new features suggest that Google is more aggressively trying to lure users to use the Google+ platform.

I didn't realize anyone's actually using Google+ anymore. I have an account and haven't touched it in weeks. I see no point since everyone I know is on Facebook. If that changes I'd use it more but until then eh it's pretty useless for me. Being a Windows Phone fan I can taste the irony in my post.

What exactly? Google+? This article? Or where you posting this from the toilet? If the latter, please don't do that again.

Bravo, Sir.

On-topic: I checked out the updated design and I really like it... shame that I rarely use Google+ because (i) it doesn't have critical mass in my circle of friends and (ii) the mobile app was a huge monster and I had to uninstall it due to space constraints. It was a very good app, though. Miles ahead of the Facebook app for Android.

I didn't realize anyone's actually using Google+ anymore. I have an account and haven't touched it in weeks. I see no point since everyone I know is on Facebook. If that changes I'd use it more but until then eh it's pretty useless for me. Being a Windows Phone fan I can taste the irony in my post.

If you're not using it, then no one is?

Here is the point in using it.

1. Google serves up ads, but Facebook directly sells your personal information to third parties. You may not care about that, but I do.2. My G+ feed isn't filled with Farmville or other such crap. Apps don't have default permissions to spam people, or get my friend's info. Games are segregated on G+3. Likewise, FB apps can hijack your account with a single link, posting links to some adware/virus site. G+ doesn't allow apps to hijack your account.4. Circles make it easy to share information with relevant people. My geeky friends don't care about the Red Sox, and my sports fan friends don't care about geeky stuff. My co-workers see different posts than my family than my friends.5. Hangouts are the shit.

I'll let you know my secret! (warning: this is going to sound like spam or an ad)1) Go to your G+ account2) Using the search bar at the top, enter the words "shared circle" and your favourite pastime, e.g. "shared circle photography".3) This will show you all the posts where someone has shared a circle of users who share the same pastime and add useful content about it to G+.4) Now you have interwebby friends you might never meet, talking about stuff you like.

5) [Bonus level] If you have an Android phone or tablet, add the G+ widget to your homescreen.

You can thank me later. Essentially G+ isn't FB. You can use it as a replacement for Facebook if your social circles move over with you; however it's more like Twitter but for people who want to use more than 140 characters/can string more than two sentences together.

Regardless of whether anyone else moves to Google+, I can assure you there are plenty of people already using it and thoroughly enjoying themselves - it just might not be you personally.

Google+ is garbage. I think I know three people who use it, and at least one has already given up and returned to Facebook.

Facebook isn't perfect- but there is a zero chance of me keeping up two social networking sites, and a zero chance that the whole world will jump ship.

I have no idea what "keep up" means - are people really this lazy... didnt people use to write letters and emails, and call people keep in mind all of those services use different tools, pen and paper, computer, phone...

IMO a social network should not be ANYTHING you need to "keep up" but should just be there when you want to use it... Contain good information.. not that you just took a crap or something... Facebook feeds have turned into the biggest waste of time..

I prefer G+ over FB. Sure most of my friends are on FB, but so what, all they do is send me annoying requests for those stupid games I can't believe anyone actually plays. In G+ I joined up with some groups that actually have something intelligent to say. On FB there are typically 300+ groups on any one subject, each one with a handful of people. Kinda lame. So ya, on FB I tend to talk to people I know and on G+ I talk to people I don't know. Both serve a purpose.

Like I said before, not enough critical mass to warrant such abuse. Google is currently in a sense trying to invite everybody to their party, so it makes little sense for them to antagonize their patrons at this point. In a sense, they're saying, "come on in (please!), there's milk and cookies, and dancing--and it's safe, we promise!"

Facebook, on the other hand, is where the party currently is, and so they have enough hubris to shove their weight around and do whatever they like.

That may change when--or if--the balance of power is redistributed--on both sides.

enderandrew wrote:

4. Circles make it easy to share information with relevant people. My geeky friends don't care about the Red Sox, and my sports fan friends don't care about geeky stuff. My co-workers see different posts than my family than my friends.

Doesn't Facebook have something similar with lists of some sort?

enderandrew wrote:

5. Hangouts are the shit.

... when people participate. It seems to me, due to its popularity, that Facebook is "the shit."

Initially it does seem much less terrible. For one, there's a big obvious button in an important spot to take me to my "stream." And they seem to have stopped calling it "stream" which is also a good idea.

If they'd release an API so that developers could make better, more useful tools that include Google+, they would have to tout minor tweaks like these as though they were substantial.

Twitter sucked until Tweetdeck, then it became useful and usable. GOOGLE+, WHERE IS YOUR API??

(Also, while I really like Google+ for photosharing, I doesn't work the same as Picasa even though they are basically the same service so when I share an album I have to go to both places to do everything I want to do. This is just poor planning, and a lack of cohesiveness within Google's own development divisions.

Blah. I was hoping that the photo improvements were good enough to match Picasa. They are not. I upgraded my desktop Picasa application and now the upload link goes to the Google+ version of my photo storage instead of the better Picasaweb interface. I'm thinking of dumping Google+ just so I can get Picasaweb integration back because the Google+ version sucks. I only signed up for Google+ to play a little Angry Birds anyway.

I'll let you know my secret! (warning: this is going to sound like spam or an ad)1) Go to your G+ account2) Using the search bar at the top, enter the words "shared circle" and your favourite pastime, e.g. "shared circle photography".3) This will show you all the posts where someone has shared a circle of users who share the same pastime and add useful content about it to G+.4) Now you have interwebby friends you might never meet, talking about stuff you like.

5) [Bonus level] If you have an Android phone or tablet, add the G+ widget to your homescreen.

Nice suggestion! I tried it with "pc games" and found a circle someone had made with some of the biggest publishers and review sites.

Now, anybody know how I can create a real-life event on G+ and track RSVPs? Is that even implemented yet? (That was the 'killer feature' for me when FB started).

I call bullshit on any numbers Google trots out as to how many members, active or otherwise, that Google+ has. Considering that I have a Gmail account, I'm sure I'm considered one of the "active" people. This, despite the fact that I haven't logged in to my profile in probably 3 months, and then only to see that still only three of my friends have signed up, and only one of them has posted anything this year.

5) [Bonus level] If you have an Android phone or tablet, add the G+ widget to your homescreen.

I would love to. But every time I install G+ on my phone (HTC Incredible w/ cyanogenmod 7.2) I start getting massive instability. It seems to crash the Google Services Framework, which in turn seems to crash pretty much all Google-related applications.

It's a shame, really. I like it much better than Facebook (which I only marginally use) but so long as the bugs persist, I'm not going to be using it with any real frequency beyond once a week or so.

FB has been copying many G+ features since the G+ launch. However, lists are implemented poorly. With Circles I can drag and drop. I can share a circle of people with a given interest so other people can check out the list. It is dead simple to select which circle sees the post. I'm not even sure people know that lists exist in FB.

Quote:

... when people participate. It seems to me, due to its popularity, that Facebook is "the shit."

Once upon a time that was Geocities, and MySpace. And once upon a time Twitter was a small startup that no one had heard of.

If you want to support a company that sells your data go ahead. But there is a much better service available.

As far as I can tell they still haven't addressed my biggest complaint about G+: no way to track read/unread status on posts.

If a feed (or stream or whatever) has content worth following, I want a way to make sure I don't miss any of it. If I don't care if I miss any of it, why should I follow it at all? Some of my friends treat it as a reliable communications medium and are shocked when I don't know about the event they announced on G+. Without the read/unread status the only way for this medium to be reliable is if I follow it religiously.

So I've given up on G+ until they address this problem.

Somewhat amusingly, I don't have this problem with Twitter because I can follow Twitter RSS feeds in Google Reader.

Cesar Torres / Cesar is the Social Editor at Ars Technica. His areas of expertise are in online communities, human-computer interaction, usability, and e-reader technology. Cesar lives in New York City.